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OF 



EDWAED EVERETT, 



AN ADDRESS 



/ 

BY lUCHAUl) H. DANA, JR. 



A.N ADDRESS 



Ul'ON TIIK 



LIFE AND SEIJVK ES 



EDWARD EVERETT; 



KELIVERED liEFOaE THE 



MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES AND CITIZENS 



OF C A M B R r D a E, 



\X 



*y^ KKBKUARY -ii, 1865. 
ft 



By RICHARD H. DANA, .lit 



CAMBRIDGE: 
SEVER AND F 11 A N C I S 

1 Stio. 






CTamlivitigr Press. 

\) A KIN AND M E T C A L K. 



CITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 

Mayor's Ofkice, Feb. 23, 18(15. 

Hox. Richard II. Dana, Jr. 

Dear Sir: Permit nie, in behalf of tlic City Council of Cambridge, 
and in accordance with the concurrent vote of both branches, a copy of 
which is herewith enclosed, to tender to you our thanks for the inter- 
esting and eloquent address upon the life and services of Edward Everett, 
delivered on the 22d inst., and to ask of you a copy of the address for 

publication. 

Yours, respectfully, 

J. WARREN MERRILL, 

Mayor. 



March 7, 18C5. 

Sir : I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communica- 
tion, with the vote of the City Council, expressing their thanks for the 
address it was niy privilege to deliver before them on the 22d ult., 
and requesting a copy for the press. 

I have reduced the address to writing, and am happy to submit the 
manuscript to their disposal. 

Believe me, 

Very respectfully yours, 

RICH? II. DANA, Jr. 
His Honor, 

J. W. Mekkilt., Mayor. 



(Titn of (Tambribae. 



In Common Council, Mart-li 22, 1865. 

Ordered^ That there be printed, un()er tlie dh-ection of tlie Juiiit 
Standing Committee on Printing, for the use of the City Council, one 
tlionsand copies of the Address delivered by Richard II. Dana, Jr., Es(i., 
before the City Government, on the 22d February last, in commemora- 
tion of the Lite and Services of Edward Everett. 

Ado])ted, and sent up for concurrence. 

Attest, JOS. G. HOLT. Cl,'rl: 



In Bo.\rd of Ar.DERMEX, March 22, 18fi,"). 
C OncuiTcd. 

Attest, JUSTIN A. JACOBS, fV/// Clerl: 



ADDRESS 



ADDRESS 



ATr. Mayor, AND Gentlemen of the City Council, - 

When we were all seeking for some phrase to 
express our sense of the worth and dignity of the 
man who has been taken from us, some one, I know 
not who, had the felicity to speak of him as the 
First Citizen of the Republic. I believe the fitness 
of this appellation has been recognized by the com- 
munity; and when Mr. Seward, at the seat of gov- 
ernment, by order of the President, announced to 
the whole country the death of Edward Everett, 
and requested that all honor should be paid to his 
memory wherever, at home or abroad, the national 
authority was recognized, all the people said Amen ! 
He belonged, indeed, to the whole country. Sci- 
ence had a claim upon him. In his youth. Poetry 
marked him for her own. The Fine Arts, in all 
their forms, recognized in lihn a devoted student. 
Public Law, international and constitutional, ac- 
knowledged him one of her best interpreters. And, 
the civilized world over, whatever the differences of 



.1 1) I) R ESS. 

langujige or the laws of naturalization, he was one 
of the foremost citizens of the Universal Republic 
of Letters. 

And yet, Mr. Mayor, you advanced no more than 
a just claim when you recommended to your brethren 
of the City Council that Cambridge should assert her 
privilege of expressing, on this day, by civic and 
military honors and public speech, the sentiment of 
the community. 

Mr. Everett was born in a neighboring town, passed 
his bojdiood in the adjoining city, and at the age of 
thirteen came to Cambridge to enter our University. 
His whole academic life was spent here. In the old 
meeting-house, now no more, scarce a bow-shot from 
where we stand, he made his first public appearance, 
in his graduating oration, at the head of his class. 
When pastor of the Church in Brattle Street, he was 
still within the sound of the college bells ; and, after 
his sojourn in Europe, it was to Cambridge that he 
returned, as his home. It was from Cambridge that 
he sent forth that influence which drew all New 
England scholars to a more earnest study of classical 
literature and art. It was upon the platform of 
that old meeting-house, again, that in 1824, in his 
Plii Beta Kappa oration, he made an era in our 
hterature, and gained the first great success for 
purely literary demonstrative oratory. For ten years 
he represented our district in Congress, always sup- 
ported by the vote of Candjridge. After varied ex- 
periences of public life, he returned to us a -ain. to 
become the President of our University. Rt^jgning 



A b 1) R E S S . 

that office, he still remained among us, performing, 
with his usual fidelity, all the duties, even the least 
conspicuous, of a ])rivate citizen. His published 
works show no less than four addresses made at ex- 
hibitions of our High School. He gave you the de- 
sign of your city seal and its motto, expressing, as it 
always seemed to me, as well his own achievement 
as the history of the town: " Liteius antiquis, novis 
iNSTiTUTis, DECORA." He was a landholder among us. 
The street that bears his name ran through his own 
acres. On the spot where the old meeting-house 
stood, — dear no doubt to him, — he j^lanted a grove 
of oaks and maples, and afterwards told the alumni 
that for that, if for nothing else, he hoped to be 
kindly remembered by posterity. He loved our Uni- 
versity. He took pride in its antiquity, its honors, 
and its wealth ; but he took more pride in remem- 
bering that our ancestors founded Harvard College, 
not at their leisure, and out of their abundance, but 
endowed it with pecks of hard-raised wheat, and 
founded it while they were yet living in log huts, 
with the Indian lurking in the swamp, and the wolf 
prowling about the door. He loved to remember 
that college-bred men founded the institutions of 
Massachusetts; that college-bred men — Harvard Col- 
lege men — argued the cause of liberty in Massachu- 
setts against the lawyers of Westminster Hall and 
the politicians of St. Stephen's Chapel ; that John 
Adams and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James 
Otis, Jo .di Quincy, and Joseph Warren, were Har- 
vard College men. 



A l> DRESS. 

And wlien the hour came to him that must come 
to all, over the familiar bridge, along the well-known 
way he came, — not, as fifty-seven years before, to 
enter the portals of the University, in the bloom of 
youth and hope, to pluck the bright fruits of the 
tree of knowledge, — but borne by a sorrowing mul- 
titude, past the portals of the University, past its 
honored halls, seeing not, hearing not, the tolling 
bells, the uncovered heads, to our own Mount Au- 
burn. And we are the guardians of all of him that 
could die. 

One evening, in the delightful circle that gathered 
about President Kirkland, upon a friendly challenge, 
he wrote his Dirge of Alaric, — familiar, trite even, 
by the declamation of school-boys, — expressing the 
defiant wish of the savage, misanthropic Visigoth: — 

" When I am dead, no pageant train 

Shall waste their sorrows at my bier, 
Nor worthless pomp of homage vain 

Stain it with hypocritic tear ; 
For I will die as I did live, 
Nor take the boon I cannot give. 

" Ye shall not raise a marble bust 

Upon the spot where I repose ; 
Ye shall not fawn before my dust. 

In hollow circumstance of woes, — 
Nor sculptured clay, nor lying breath 
Insult the clay that moulds beneath. 

" Ye shall not i)ile, with servile toil. 
Your monuments upon my breast ; 
Nor yet, witiiin tlic common soil, 

Lay flown tlic wreck of power to rest, 
10 



A DDR E S ^ . 



"Where man can boast that he has trod 
On him that was ' the scourge of God.* 



" But ye the mountain stream shall turn, 

And lay its secret channel bare, 
And hollow, for your sovereign's urn, 

A resting-place forever there ; 
Then bid its everlasting springs 

Flow back upon the king of kings ; 
And never be the secret said, 
Until the deep give up his dead." 

It was no hypocritic tear that fell upon his coffin ! 
It was no homage vain that we paid at his bier ! 
We will raise the marble bust! We will rear, with 
no servile toil, but with the glad service of the 
whole community, the monument upon his breast ! 
We have given him no secret burial beneath the 
waters of a rushing, oblivious flood ; but we have 
laid him within the common soil, in consecrated 
earth ; and there the fixed, patient marble, blessed 
in its consecration, shall point for ages to the spot 
where lies, not the wreck of power, not the scourge 
of God, but the benefactor of his race and age. 

The day is auspicious. If there is a name which 
may be fitly connected with the birthday of the 
father of his country, it is the name of Edward 
Everett ! 

This presence, too, is propitious. Magistrates, citi- 
zens of renown, have come down to us from their 
high places, — have come up, rather, — for he called 
this our intellectual metropolis, the beautiful Mount 

Zion of the mind. 

11 



ADDRESS. 

All is propitious, — the place, the authority, the 
day, the presence. I alone need invoke consideration 
and excuse. 

The history of Mr. Everett's life is too familiar to 
require or justify anything like biographical detail 
from me. He loved to remember and to say that, 
in respect of birth and education, he had nothing 
that was not common to all ; that he owed to our 
common institutions all he was and all he ever should 
))e. He was not, as some would falsely say, favored 
by fortune with high birth, great wealth, and 
shining social position, achieved for him by others. 
He was favored only — how could he possibly have 
been favored more? — in his mental and moral consti- 
tution, and in the blessing of an educated, intelligent, 
religious parentage. What better picture could be 
presented of the results of our institutions than a 
yeoman's son from New Hampshire studying law in 
an office in Boston, eking out the slender support 
of himself and his brother, by occasionally teach- 
ing under the low roof of the school-house in Cross 
Street, and, book in hand, Daniel Webster hearing 
the recitation of Edward Everett ! Through life, Mr. 
Everett bore the faithful impress of these beginnings. 
Scholarly, sensitive, reserved, fastidious, he yet had no 
tendencies to the aristocratic. A reverent student of 
antiquity, a devotee of honored names and places, he 
yet had few Jinswering chords to the imposing claims 
of high birth, long descent, the traditional eclat of 
generations, and the splendid results of primogeni- 
tiiie and entail. In individuals, as in communities, 

\2 



.1 DURESS. 

lie seemed to look for, to value, little else than in- 
telligence, virtue, culture, and manners. 

Schoolmates, classmates, the greater intimacy of 
room-mates, have borne testimony to the purity 
and high purpose of his youth, and to that radiant, 
hopeful beauty that gave him an easy power of 
fascination. But, not content with a success so easily 
obtained, he gave to everything labor as patient and 
systematic as the dullest faculties would have re- 
quired, and thus plucked those fruits of knowledge 
and honor which seemed but to fall at his touch. 
There is a tradition of the elated, joyous sensation 
that pervaded the audience at his graduating oration, 
delivered at the age of seventeen, and at his poem 
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the next year. 
At an age when most young men now enter college, 
he was called to the pulpit of Brattle Street, then 
the most exacting pulpit in Boston, to be the suc- 
cessor of Buckminster ; and surely, it should be 
enough for me to say that, while yet in his mi- 
nority, the received opinion was that, in point of 
pulpit eloquence, he had equalled his predecessor. 

It was not only as a pulpit orator that he be- 
came celebrated. Mr. George Bethune English, a man 
not without parts and acquirements, had published 
a pamphlet attacking the claims of Christianity as 
a divine revelation. The work was having too much 
influence, which some attempts at answering it had 
not diminished, when Mr. Everett brought to bear 
upon it the force of his scholarship, logic, eloquence, 

and wit. He not only refuted the arguments of 

iH 



I 



ADDRESS 



Mr. English, but so destroyed his credit as a scholar 
and an honest controversialist, that he sent the 
pamphlet down to oblivion with such an acceleration 
of force as to carry along the refutation with it; 
and now after just half a century of penal service 
in the land of forgetfulness, it has been dragged 
back, to add to the funeral honors of its censor, an 
unwilling witness to the justness and comj)leteness 
of its condemnation. 

At this time there was no separate professorship 
of Greek at Harvard, and it w\as the earnest desire 
of President Kirkland that one should be established. 
At his suggestion, such a professorship was founded 
by a liberal citizen of Boston, Mr. EHot. There was 
no person thought to be fully qualified, and it was 
understood that whoever was appointed to the post 
should pass several years of preparatory study in 
Europe. It was without difficulty that the choice 
fell upon Mr. Everett, and he sailed in the early 
spring of 1815, and spent nearly five years there. 

This I regard as the decisive period of his life. 
Will you, therefore, go back with me, and, shutting 
your eyes to the present, forgetting all that fifty 
years have done for our country, consider what it 
w^as that he left, and to wdiat he went? 

The entire free white population of the country did 
not exceed six millions. Our claims to high civiliza- 
tion were put forth uncertainly at home, and hardly 
regarded aljroad. Extreme doctrines of State rights 
had so prevailed that we hardly knew^ whether we 
hiid a central government. The first spade had not 



14 



ADDRESS. 

been struck in the Erie Canal. Not a house stood 
upon the wastes where are now the cities of Lowell 
and Lawrence; and the Merrimack and the Connecti- 
cut ran their whole course unobstructed to the sea. 
It was seven years afterward that the first manufac- 
turing corporation on the Merrimack Avas organized. 
Antiquity of our race on this continent, there was 
none. Time had not, as now, gathered about our 
early history its gray hues and venerable forms. 
Names now classic were familiar and recent. The 
sages of the revolutionary period had not shuffled 
off the mortal coil of party connection and prejudice. 
Of later men, Webster's name was not known across 
the Atlantic ; and Wheaton, Kent, and Story had not 
written one of the works which have made them 
authority in both hemispheres. In history, Prescott 
had graduated that year, Bancroft and Palfrey were in 
college, Hildreth was at school, and Motley an infant 
in his cradle. Universities, except in name, we had 
none. No college had a scientific school in connec- 
tion with it, nor a law school in successful operation. 
There were no museums of Zoology or Anatomy, 
few and poor cabinets of Geology and Mineralogy, 
and not an observatory nor a sidereal telescope. We 
had no public library as large or as rich as the 
private library of Lord Spencer at his country-seat at 
Althorpe. In the fine arts. West and Copley, always 
British subjects, were domiciled in London, and All- 
ston, still young, was studying and travelhng in 
Europe. We had no galleries of pictures or statues. 
I doubt if there was even a professed original of the 

15 



ADDRESS. 

great musters in tlie land, and we had produced no 
native sculptor. 

In architecture, our Capitol and other public build- 
ings at Washington were smoking ruins ; and, except 
a few State Houses, we had scarcely a secular building 
with any pretensions to architectural effect ; while 
religious architecture had hardly begun its exodus 
from the clapboarded and shingled barns of our 
ancestors. In music, we had some marches and 
popular songs ; but the opera and prima donna from 
Europe had not visited us ; and, except some modest 
attempts at the 'great oratorios in Boston, religious 
music had hardly dared even to plan its escape from 
the prison-house of Puritan restraints. Monuments, 
we had none, — neither at Concord, nor at Lexington, 
nor on Bunker Hill. In poetry, there had been pa- 
triotic effusions, but their merits were rather moral 
than artistic. The Thanatopsis had not been written, 
nor one of those poems which have given to their 
authors the name and tame of American poets. Irv- 
ing had not written his Sketch-Book, nor Cooper 
one of his novels; and it was five years after Mr. 
Everett sailed for Europe that the most liberal of 
British essayists, in the most liberal of British jour- 
nals, put the famous question, " Who, in the four 
quarters of the globe, reads an American book?" 

Such was the country which he left, — he, the 
scholar, the poet, the devout student of antiquity, 
the lover of the fine arts, the appreciator of science, 
the delighted sojourner in libraries and galleries, the 
i-everent visitor of consecrated spots, — and for what? 



,1 /> iJ /: K s.s 



He went to trace a civilization of twenty-five hun- 
dred years, — an anti([uity counting Ijy tens of centu- 
ries as we count by years ; to muse among the fallen 
columns, the broken arches, the ruined walls of a 
civilization of exquisite beauty ; to follow the faint 
traces of the site of Troy ; to wander through the 
pass of Thermopylre, and over the fields of Marathon 
and Plata3a. He went to visit not only the Rome 
of Cicero and Virgil and the Caesars, but the Rome 
of to-day, the Eternal City, the seat of the more 
wonderful ecclesiastical power. He went, not only 
to explore the traces of the past, but to meet the 
splendid civilization of actual Europe ; to note the 
tread of armies and the sweep of navies ; to see 
Europe bristling with bayonets from Gibraltar to 
the North Sea; to confront the dazzling military 
fame of Napoleon ; to see statesmen assembling 
at Vienna and Paris to lay out the boundaries of 
empires, to make gifts of crowns and sceptres, and 
to settle the public law of Europe; and to meet 
princes and nobles, heads of families of an antiq- 
uity running back to a mythical origin, whose 
ancestors for generations had commanded armies 
and navies, led senates and cabinets, and not only 
affected the destinies of empires, but changed the 
flice of nature itself. The peculiar child of aca- 
demic education, he went to visit universities where 
were gathered the teachers and the taught of a 
continent; and to find, at Oxford, a university so 
ancient that one of its colleges, called, pw excel- 
lence, the New College, was founded a hundred years 



17 



ADDRESS. 

before Columbus discovered America. The student 
of books, lie went to examine libraries where had 
been gathered not only all there was of literature 
in printed volumes, but illuminated manuscripts and 
parchments older than the revival of letters. The 
lover of art, he went not only to explore the beau- 
tiful remains of classic art in all its orders, but to 
view the castles and towers of the feudal ages, and 
magnificent Gothic structures on so vast a scale that 
through the great windows of one of them might 
have been pushed, one after the other, all the build- 
ings of his Alma Mater, their cellars and chimneys 
with them. He went to observe historic spots in all 
parts of the continent, marked by fit monuments, and 
the great squares of cities embellished by the statues 
of heroes, sages, saints, and kings; to visit galleries 
where w^ere collected the paintings of the schools 
of every age and nation ; and to find, hidden among 
the untrodden ways on the roof of the Cathedral 
at Milan, more marble statuary than he could have 
found, in his own country, from Maine to the Mis- 
sissippi. The appreciator of science, there lay before 
him not only the homes and working-places of 
Galileo, Copernicus, Leibnitz, Kepler, and Newton, 
but he was to find living and honored Humboldt, 
Cuvier, and Davy. The orator and student of history 
and public law, he went not only to stand where 
Demosthenes and ^Eschines had contended and Si 
Paul had preached, where Cicero and Hortensius had 
spoken, but in the land of his mother tongue, to 
enter halls jibout whose arches he might fancy yet 

18 



ADDRESS. 



lingered tones" of Chatham, Burke, Fox, and the 
younger Pitt. He went to hear the rising elo- 
quence of Cannmg; to see Castlereagh return from 
representing triumphant England at Vienna, assign- 
ing to kings and empires their limits and their laws, 
and adjusting the balance of power for Europe ; and 
to meet, in the familiarity of private intercourse, 
Romilly, Mackintosh, and Hallam. A poet, he was 
not only to wanJer among scenes ennobled by the 
verse of Homer and of the bright company of later 
Grecian poets, — to visit the tomb of Virgil and tlie 
villa of Horace; not only to follow the later traces 
of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Tasso, and the still 
greener memory of Schiller, and in the home of his 
forefathers the footsteps of Shakspeare, Milton, Dry- 
den, and Pope ; but to sojourn in lands illumined by 
the living genius of Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Southey, Campbell, and Moore; to talk with Byron 
in his library, and to be the guest of Scott at 
Abbotsford. 

I pass over his studiousness at Gottingen, where 
Mr. Ticknor tells us that, on one occasion, Mr. Ev- 
erett, desiring to send to President Kirkland a state- 
ment of the system of the German Universities, and 
wishing to get it off by a certain mail, gave to it, 
without sleep or rest, thirty-five consecutive hours. I 
pass by his instructive travels, his days spent in use- 
ful observation and in the society of the learned 
and the eminent, and his nights intensely studious, — 
remarking only that he, if any one, had a right to 
say to tlio young men of his country that the busiest 



19 



ADDRESS. 

have time enough for much additional labor, if their 
passions and indolence would suffer them, and that 
a man's future dej^ended much upon his choice of 
pleasures, and the way in which he spent his leisure 
hours; — I pass by all this, to ask — with what con- 
victions and purposes did he return to his native 
land ? 

We will await the answer until he gives it him- 
self Returnino; to Cambrido-e, he delivered his 
courses of lectures, for nearly six years, upon Greek 
and incidentally upon Roman literature and art, 
which gave an impulse to those studies, and threw 
over them an attraction which, short as was his 
term of office, must have quite repaid the care of 
President Kirkland and the liberality of Mr. Eliot. 
He was still a preacher, and his first sermon, after 
his return, Avas preached at Brattle Street. The 
present pastor of that society will tell you, that, 
then a bov at school, bv dint of goino^ verv earlv 
to the church, and crowding persistently through the 
passages, he succeeded in getting a standing-place in 
a window-seat, where, looking between the shoulders 
of two men, he caught his first view, in the pulpit, 
of Edward Everett, and received his first impres- 
sion of what was meant b}" the word Eloquence. 
Mr. Everett preached on several occasions, and one 
sermon, especially remembered, from the text, "The 
time is short." There are men who can tell you now 
^vhat words, what tones, sent a thrill through the 
audience ; nud more sensitive women who will con- 
fess to you, perhaps, — they might if \\\q\ would, — 



20 



.1 l> l> II E S S 



at what word, what tone it was that, having lield 
bravely out till then, they gave way to tears. 

In 1824, he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa ora- 
tion ; and in that it is that I discover the convic- 
tions and purposes with which he returned to his 
native land. I find in that the key-note to his sub- 
sequent life. 

I pass over the dramatic character of the scene, — 
the presence of heroes and sages of the Revolution, 
and of Lafayette himself, — which have made it one 
of our historic epochs. I cannot attempt to describe 
to you — they only who saw it can probably appre- 
ciate it — the thrilling effect of his allusion to Lafay- 
ette. He described the young hero, ready to cast 
aside rank, wealth, honors, home, all for our distant 
and desperate struggle, offering to our commission- 
ers at Paris the service of himself and friends, 
and asking only transportation to America ; and 
our country so poor in money and in credit that 
our commissioners were obliged to say that they 
could not provide him a vessel. "Then," cried the 
youthful hero, "I will provide my own!" There 
was something in the presence of that hero him- 
self, in the magnetism of the orator, that caused a 
scene which can be described by scarce any other 
Avord than hmmli. It was many minutes before or- 
der was restored. Old men sprang to their feet, 
shook one another's hands, and shed tears, as if they 
had that moment heard that Lafayette was coming 
to their aid in the most desperate state of their 
fortunes. And Lalavette himself, never perfect in 



21 



ADDRESS. 

our language, not detecting the application, was 
among the most active in the applause. 

I may, however, pause to say that Mr. Everett on 
that clay founded the school of literary, demonstra- 
tive oratory in America. I limit my meaning by 
those words : Uteranj, as distinguished from theologi- 
cal, political, scientific, or jurisprudential ; dcmonstra- 
thr, as not looking to any action on the part of 
the persons addressed, to any immediate result of 
vote, verdict, or judgment, but resting in general 
impressions ; oratory^ as distinguished from reading 
or simple recitation, and giving scope to all the 
arts and powers of elocution. This school has had 
many disciples and some masters ; but Mr. Ever- 
ett was its founder, and, to the last, acknowledged 
as its great master. I have spoken of this school 
in America. In Europe it does not exist. It went 
out with the decline of liberty in Greece and Rome. 
They have, on the continent of Europe everywhere, 
the eloquence of the pulpit ; in some parts, propor- 
tionately to popular liberty, the eloquence of the 
forum ; and in England, but scarcely upon the conti- 
nent, the eloquence of the senate. They have learned 
lectures on many subjects, read, mostly sitting, from 
the chairs of universities and societies ; but Europe 
has not, even in England, as a general effective pop- 
ular practice, literary demonstrative orator}^, nor lias 
it been known in Europe for two thousand years. 

I pass b}' all this to answer, at last, the question, 
with what purposes and convictions did Mr. Everett 
enter upon his public life? 



ADDRESS. 



He had not been dazzled by the splendid spec- 
tacles of military power in Europe. In standing 
armies, he saw only a modern contrivance, not two 
hundred years old, for binding despotisms upon dis- 
armed and disfranchised peoples. He looked with 
less dismay upon the turbulence of ancient democ- 
racies, and upon the rude independence of the 
feudal ages. Admitting the dangers and horrors of 
mobs, he yet cried, " But, oh ! the disciplined, the 
paid, the honored mob, not moving in rags and 
starvation, to some act of blood or plunder, but 
marching, in all the pomp and circumstance of 
war, to lay waste some feebler State, or cantoned 
at home among an overawed and broken-spirited 
people ! " 

All his observation and study had brought him to 
the conviction that the general diffusion of intelli- 
gence, and the greatest moral and intellectual 
development of human nature were possible only 
where popular liberty existed, and popular systems 
of self-government. He not only contended that 
this must be so, because, under such systems, artifi- 
cial inequalities being removed and an opportunity 
being given to all, men were working in harmony 
with the natural law by which intellect itself is 
distributed, wdiich he called "a sterner leveller than 
ever marched in the van of a revolution;" but he 
deduced it from the flicts of history. He contended 
that althoudi the natural and exact sciences and cer- 
tain forms of arts and learning might flourish under 
imperial patronage, yet, not only was knowledge the 

23 



A D IJ li ESS. 

most generally diffused among all, but the greatest 
heights attained by the few, where popular liberty 
existed, and in proportion as it existed. He re- 
minded his audience of scholars, that Constantine, 
controlling half the world by his arms, was obliged 
to tear down an arch of Trajan to find sculpture 
for his own. He had not mused as a sentimentalist, 
nor groped like an antiquarian or a pedant, among 
the ruins of Greece and Rome; but, as a patriot and 
a thinker, he had gathered from them wisdom for 
his own age and people. He saw that the Greek re- 
publics were democracies undertaking to administer 
government in person, without a system of represen- 
tation or agency, — never, in fact, getting beyond the 
town-meetin": in Faneuil Hall, and necessarilv con- 
fined within the walls of a single city. Their colonies 
and dependencies they governed with absolute power, 
never extending to them community in government. 
They skirted the shores of the Mediterranean, pene- 
trating but little into the interior; and so narrow 
were the limits of their civilization, that he tells us, 
in one of his picturesque sentences, that the moun- 
tain-tops of Thrace, the proverbial home of barba- 
rism, could be seen from the porch of the temple of 
Minerva at Sunium. These republics, with all their 
civil splendor and military prowess, went down, one 
after another, before the imperial power of Philip 
and afterward of the Romans, because they could 
not or would not make the sacrifices necessary to 
form a centi-al State, — to do what our ancestors did 
ill 1788, forui a more perfect union ''to provide for 

24 



A D DRESS. 

the common defence and promote the general wel- 
fiire." He saw that the Roman repubHc was an in- 
tensely centrahzed State, hokling all its colonies and 
provinces under absolute military government, Rome 
alone being a metropolis, and everything else provin- 
cial, if not barbarous. This centralization of power 
made the struggle for its possession intense and 
deadly, and the influx of wealth and luxury to the 
one centre brought effeminacy and corruption, until 
Rome herself yielded to barbarian invaders. 

From these pictures, he turned to our own conti- 
nent and our system, at once centralized and dis- 
tributed ; where nothing is provincial and nothing 
metropolitan ; founded in democracy, but adminis- 
tered by a conservative system of representation and 
agency ; centralized sufficiently for defence from for- 
eio;n ao:o:ression, for the creation of a national senti- 

O DO ' 

ment, and to preserve the peace and rights of the 
States, yet distributed enough for the general diffusion 
of political education and dignities. By the feature 
of a single executive, head, we secured some of the 
advantages of monarchy; by courts, senates, and cab- 
inets of selected men, some of the benefits of aris- 
tocracy ; while, by the distribution of powers among 
coordinate and competing departments, and by writ- 
ten constitutions to which were secured the force 
and sanctions of law, and by frequent elections, we 
seemed to protect ourselves adequately against usur- 
pation. He looked to the national government not 
only to preserve our unity and to protect us from 
abroad, but as the only means of securing the local 



ADDRESS. 

governments themselves, and of keeping the peace of 
a continent. But it was upon the local institutions 
of the State and the town that he depended for that 
general diffusion of knowledge and character which 
alone can elevate the whole human race. Each man 
a citizen, as far as possible owning the land on which 
he lived, called to sit upon the jury, would feel him- 
self part of the magistracy of the land ; bearing arms, 
he was part of its military power ; and, intrusted 
with a vote, he was a portion of the political sov- 
ereignty. His functions, however slight in degree, 
were, in kind, sovereign. He trusted to these duties 
and responsibilities, with the education of the church 
and the school, to sober and elevate the public mind. 
He answered the argument that letters and art 
needed princely or metropolitan patronage. He not 
only exposed the partial and limited operation of 
such patronage, from well-known instances and from 
the nature of the case, but declared that the best 
patronage was opportunity and stimulus ; and where 
could such opportunities and stimulus be found as 
would be furnished by the needs, the tastes, and the 
pride of vast educated communities ? Has not this 
proved true ? I ask you, Mr. Agassiz, whether, in 
your science, as far removed as possible from the 
passions and interests of the hour, the demands of an 
intelligent community are not a better patronage, 
not only because a hundred thousand dollars from 
a hundred givers has more of promise and encour- 
acrement than a hundred thousand dollars from one 

giver ; but whether, measured by dollars and cents, 
2<; 



ADDRESS. 

it is not richer tlum the 2){itroiiage of kings and 
princes? And he answered the argument, that pop- 
ular systems, if they created more activity, gave it 
an undue direction to poUtics. He showed, that un- 
der monarchies and aristocracies, it was only the 
service of the state, in peace or war, that was con- 
sidered worthy of the noble ; while, in republics, 
letters, arts, science, commerce, and teaching were 
dignified in all. 

He was not satisfied with the prospect of a low 
level of mediocrity. He knew that, as in visible 
nature inequalities are essential to beauty and to 
health, so, in every state and society, there must be 
kings and nobles; but he hoped that under our 
system, artificial inequalities being removed and a 
chance given to all, we should find — not always, for 
he was no dreamer ; nor perhaps generally, but 
more often than under any other system — that the 
sceptre would pass to the hand of the natural king, 
the coronet on the head of the natural noble, as 
we place the wreath on the brow of the real poet 
and the gown on the shoulders of the veritable 
scholar. 

But there was one view of the future of our 
country which seemed to possess and animate him 
more than any other. One of the greatest myste- 
ries of our nature is that process by which we make 
with the tongue vibrations on the air, which, strik- 
ing upon the ear, convey to others our thought, 
wish, or emotion ; or, by the cunning of the hand, 
form strange black marks on paper, by which souls 

27 



ADDRESS. 

iiitercliange ideas. Yet it somehow happens — and 
that is no less a mystery — that, by a strange law of 
their being, men will make different sounds and dif- 
ferent marks, totally unintelligible to each other; and 
so it is that men, charged to the full with thought 
and emotion, are totally unable to communicate in- 
telligently. Mr. Everett had not only seen in libra- 
ries and on monuments these laborious attempts at 
expression unintelligible to the greater part of the 
human race, and sometimes to all the living ; but in 
Europe, he had found that a river interposed, or a 
chain of hills, left millions of men, intelligent and 
cultivated, without the power of intercommunication : 
orators, statesmen, poets, preachers, charged with 
the interests of the world, standing deaf and dumb 
in the presence of each other ! He saw how this 
not only restricted personal communication, but lim- 
ited the power of the press in permanent as well 
as current literature, discouraged effort and shut out 
wisdom. 

He turned toward his own country, and saw a vast 
empire filling up with a people speaking a common 
language and possessing a common literature. He 
presented his statistics to show that the ten millions 
of that day would become thirty, fifty, an hundred, 
— and why not, like the Chinese Empire, three 
hundred millions ? He declared then, as, when Sec- 
retary of State, he said to Lord John Russel, in 
1853, that he saw no necessary limits to our repub- 
lic, but the geographical limits of the continent. 
His soul swelled at the thought of such a world of 



A D Dli E 6 S . 

human beings, all able to understand one another. 
What a stimulus to the press in periodical and per- 
manent literature ! What fields for the orator of the 
pulpit, the forum, the senate, and the platform! 
What inspiration to the poet, the philosopher, the 
man of science! What a benefit to each one of 
these receiving millions, from the higher character 
of the supply so vast a demand would create ! 

Was this a baseless vision? We have risen to 
thirty millions, covering the continent; and there 
is less of provincialism or dialect in the whole land 
than within the sound of Bow Bells, or within any 
one of the counties of England. May this not con- 
tinue with our increase ? There are certain condi- 
tions. The language must be anchored to a com- 
mon alphabet and a common and substantially 
unchanging mode of spelling. It is moored to the 
English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Shak- 
speare, Milton, and John Bunyan, and that company 
of later writers, in prose and verse, whose language 
is the vernacular of our race. 

A common national government; a common writ- 
ten constitution, which all must understand; the 
periodical election of a President, upon principles 
to be canvassed through the land, with a voter at 
every hearth-stone ; a common legislature, debating 
in a common tongue, its members chosen from 
every district; the rapid and general circulation of 
a daily press; and, above all, the instant communi- 
cation by telegraph to every part of the land of 

thino-s which it is the interest of all to hear at 

■>'J 



ADDRESS. 

once : these all keep the pool so troubled as to give 
no chance for dialects and jDrovincialisms to form 
upon the surface. What more affecting proof of this, 
than when Mr. Seward, the other Sunday afternoon, 
announced, in a few hours, in words understood by 
all, to the millions of the land, — the merchants and 
the manufacturers of the seaboard, the farmers of the 
interior, and the miners among the mountains, — the 
death of Edward Everett ! 

A scholar, a Greek professor, so far from lament- 
ing the good old times when a few scholars could 
alone understand one another over Europe in a 
dead language, he held up to the admiration of an 
assembly of scholars the vision of a vernacular for 
a continent. He boldly attacked the saying of Ba- 
con, that Luther prevailed because he awaked all 
antiquity, and declared that Luther prevailed be- 
cause he awaked the native tongue of Germany, 
because he spoke to the land in the speech of the 
fireside and the street ; and that if he had battled 
only in Latin, he would have been answered in better 
Latin from the Vatican, and the people would have 
seen in it only a contest between angry priests. 

We can see now why he thought the discovery of 
this continent by Columbus in the fulness of time, and 
held back by Providence until that time, the greatest 
event, not supernatural, in the history of man. We 
see how he valued the settlement of this country by 
such men as did settle it, — men trained to hardship, 
self-command, and serious thought. Puritans, jj^rse- 
cuted by church and state; churchmen and royalists, 

30 



ADDRESS. 



banished by the Puritan Commonwealth ; Huguenots, 
persecuted by CathoHc France ; CathoHcs, persecuted 
by Protestant England ; Germans, exiled by the 
wars of Louis XIV., and (Quakers, persecuted by all, 
settled the various parts of our country. He looked 
upon our system as the great experiment, on a vast 
field prepared for it by the providence of God, for the 
moral and intellectual development of the human 
race, by the agency of individual liberty and popu- 
lar, responsible systems of self-government. As he 
approached his native land, he saw a bright bow of 
promise spanning the western continent. He felt 
that his mission was not to preach in the pulpit of 
Brattle Street, nor in any other pulpit; but, con- 
scious of powers of speech, assured of them by the 
public testimony, he determined to enter upon a 
public career of national life, and to devote all he 
was and had acquired, to securing the successful issue 
of this vast experiment. I doubt not that he was 
ambitious. But he sought opportunities, and not 
office. He asked but a hearing, and no other re- 
wards than that approbation, which I admit was dear 
to him, and fame, to which he had too much of 
genius to be indifferent. 

He knew we held our treasure in earthen ves- 
sels. He was no Utopian or sentimentalist. He had 
read and seen too much of the passions and weak- 
nesses of men, not to know that our great experi- 
ment might fail. He knew that the organization 
of millions into a State, permanent and benefi- 
cent, was a result for human nature rarelv obtained. 



31 



ADDRESS. 



dearly bought, precariously held, and, if lost, hardly 
retrained. 

Those who knew him slightly may have thought 
that he gave undue prominence to the subjects of 
his classical studies. Since his death, I have read 
the greater part of his published writings, and can 
truly say that I doubt if ever so good a scholar 
wrote and spoke so much, saying so little of the 
Greeks and Romans. He always declared that their 
civilization had one fatal defect, the lack of spiritual 
vitality. He reminded the scholars of the Phi Beta 
Kappa that the hero of ThermopyliB would not 
have hesitated to tear his only child from the bosom 
of its mother, if it happened to be a sickly babe, and 
carry it out to be eaten by the wolves of Tayge- 
tus; that the heroes of Marathon unchained their 
slaves from the door-posts of their masters to go 
out and fight the battles of freedom. Painting the 
possibility of our failure in this grand trust, and its 
direful consequences to human nature, he exclaimed, 
"Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her 
poisoned, dying Demosthenes; Rome pleads with us 
in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully." 

He saw the necessity of exciting feelings of pride 
and respect for our common ancestry, — of elevating 
the whole work of this nation, past, present, and to 
come, to the highest plane of dignity. True to his 
mission, our horizon was lighted up by unwonted 
fires at Concord, Lexington, Charlestown, and Plym- 
outh. The names and places were not then clas- 
sical. The actors in the Revolution were living, 

32 



.1 l> I) li E S S . 

with the familiar, .sometimes the disagreeable, even 
the ludicrous, sides of their characters open to view. 
The road to Lexington was but a dusty highway 
leading by Whittemore's Tavern, toiled over by coun- 
try wagons, and herds of sheep and oxen driven to 
the shambles at Brighton ; but to his eye of faith, to 
his vivid imagination, Lexington and Concord, Plym- 
outh and Bunker Hill, were more truly worthy of 
consecration than Thermopylse or Plata^a, Marathon 
or the Eurymedon, With rare rhetorical courage, he 
encountered the plebeian surnames, and those un- 
couth Hebrew first names revived to be misapplied 
and mispronounced after four thousand years. In the 
height of a dramatic description of the spread of the 
alarm of the British march to Lexington, he did not 
fear to name the borrowing of Deacon Larkin's horse; 
and captivity among the Indians was no less digni- 
fied to him because it was the captivity of Mrs. Je- 
mima Howe and Mr. Pilkial Grout! He had heard a 
voice saying to him, — What God hath cleansed, that 
call not thou common ! What to him were the child- 
ish fables that hang over the origin of Greek and 
Roman cities, compared with the time when Massa- 
chusetts consisted of six huts at Salem, and one hut 
at Charlestown ? The covered wagon, marked " To 
Marietta, Ohio," carrying the first westward emigra- 
tion from Massachusetts, with its stock of household 
utensils, was more classic to him than a pantheon of 
Greek and Roman Lares, Penates, and Termini. Our 
civilization was not to present the picturesque ef- 
fects of castles, palaces, and towers, and the imposing 

E 33 



.1 IJ D R E S S . 

material results of great inequalities of condition, 
but a land dotted over with cliurches, colleges, 
school-houses, town-halls, lecture-rooms, museums, ob- 
servatories, galleries, hospitals, and asylums. "A ster- 
ile hill-side in New England, with a well-kept village 
school at its foot," was not only a promise of more 
true wealth to a people, but of more in dollars and 
cents, than the " lucrative desolation of the sugar 
islands." 

His published volumes show addresses delivered at 
our historical anniversaries, on the 19th of April, at 
Lexington, two; at Concord, two; on the 22d of Feb- 
ruary, two; on the 17th of June, four; on the 22d of 
December, four; on the 4th of July, eight; and at the 
anniversaries of the settlements of Springfield, Barn- 
stable, Dedham, and Dorchester, and of John Win- 
throp's landing at Charlestown; and upon the deaths 
of Adams and Jefferson, Lafayette, John Quincy Ad- 
ams, and Webster; and at the inauguration of monu- 
ments to Franklin, Warren, and John Harvard. 

Doubtless, as he always acknowledged, he owed 
New England much; but New England owes to him, 
more than to any other man, the artistic consecra- 
tion of her historic names and epochs. "If," said 
he, " my voice is hushed on these themes, may it 
never be listened to on any other." 

Not hushed on these themes, it was heard on 
many others. Science, art, literature, charities, all 
shared the benefits of his eloquence. In the au- 
tumn of 1857, when, by reason of commercial dis- 
tress, a hard winter was anticipated for the poor, 
;i4 



A D U li K S S . 

he delivered an address before the Boston Provident 
Society, which you will remember by that beautiful 
description of the scenery from the hill of Four- 
vieres, behind Lyons, which lies in the memory like 
a landscape of Claude ; and by the contrast he 
drew between the partial, unsystematic, individual 
almsgiving of Southern Europe, which has made 
mendicancy a profession, and the impartial, system- 
atized, universal operation of popular, charitable 
societies. This discourse he delivered during the 
winter in the principal cities of the land, — at Rich- 
mond, at Charleston, and St. Louis, — in all, at 
fifteen places, obtaining, by the sale of tickets of 
admission, nearly $15,000 for the benefit of the 
poor of the respective cities. 

His most exquisitely finished address upon scien- 
tific subjects is that at the opening of the Dudley 
Observatory at Albany. I had a personal experi- 
ence in connection with that discourse, which in- 
vests it, for me, with a peculiar interest. In the 
year 18G0, it was my fortune to cross the Pacific 
Ocean, a passenger in an American merchantman. 
The unspeakable beauty of the nights, while running- 
down the trade-winds in the Pacific tropics, kept 
me much on deck. The companion of my walk 
was often the chief mate. He was a man of 
very imperfect education, but with considerable 
natural capacity. His duties as a navigator, and 
the constant presence of the "brave o'erhanging 
firmament, the majestical roof fretted with golden 
fires," naturally led us to tlie topic of astronomy. 



AUUliESS. 

lie asked me if I had ever read a speech at the 
opening of an observatory at Albany, by Edward 
Everett, who he believed lived in my part of the 
Union. He was not a little impressed when I told 
him that I had not only read the address, but knew 
Mr. Everett himself. He said that he happened to 
find it in the cabin of a ship, and had read it 
again and again. With an inadequate vocabulary 
and stammering speech, he tried to explain to me 
the thoughts and emotions this address had awa- 
kened within him; and he did make me feel, better 
than eloquence could have done, that upon the hard, 
low course of his life there had opened a vision 
of celestial, light; that he had been made to feel 
something of the vastness of the universe, of infinity 
against sj)ace, and of eternity against time ; that he 
had been elevated by the sense of being able to 
entertain such thoughts, proving to him the gran- 
deur and immortality of his nature. I regret that I 
never remembered to mention this to Mr. Everett. 
I am sure he would have valued it as not the 
least of his many satisfactions. 

Among other subjects, Mr. Everett delivered dis- 
courses upon the colonization of Africa, education 
in the West, the importance of science to working 
men, prison discipline, spoke frequently before agri- 
cultural societies upon moral and intellectual topics 
relating to agriculture, — one being upon the treat- 
ment of animals, — and at the anniversaries of most 
of our colleges, and of many literary societies ; and, 
as a mere incident, which would have been labor 



A IJ U HESS. 

enough for some men, he was, for many years, the 
editor of the North American Review, and always 
one of its contributors. 

The subject of the miUtia engaged his earnest 
attention. Although he truly said he loved not 
war nor any of its works, he knew that wars 
were sometimes inevitable and just. He could un- 
derstand the position of the Quaker, who disallows 
all use of force, and would disband the militia, 
abolish West Point and Annapolis, and prohibit 
the bearing of arms or the manuficture of muni- 
tions of war, and strive to make the duty of a sol- 
dier morally odious; but he could not understand 
how persons admitting that war might ever be just 
or inevitable, could hold up to ridicule or to moral 
aversion the duty of a citizen soldier in a republic. 
Knowing that w^ar is a science and a progressive sci- 
ence, he advocated a liberal support of the Military 
Academy, with a small army, to furnish educated 
officers and the nucleus for volunteer and militia 
organizations in times of war ; but it was to the 
militia, the arms-bearing citizens, that he looked for 
that force which, in times of exigency, should be a 
defence against our enemies, without being danger- 
ous to our institutions; and one of the reasons he 
gave for a general education was that arms were 
safest in the hands of educated and responsible 
men. In his discourse upon our French and Indian 
War, " the school of the Revolution," he said that, 
without a standing army, the people of Massachu- 
setts had been one of the most martial people on 



ADDRESS. 

earth ; that every fifth man had been in service ; 
that a hirger proj)ortion of the able-bodied men of 
Massachusetts had been mustered into miUtary ser- 
vice, during the seven years of that war, than 
Napoleon led into the field from the French people 
in the height of his power ; and that the lines on 
Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights were drawn 
and our militia organized and commanded by men 
who had served with British regulars against French 
regulars on the frontiers, in Canada, at Louisburg, 
and in the West Indies. If the militia should not 
be sustained with credit, he thought we exposed 
ourselves to violence at home and abroad, or in- 
curred the peril of standing armies. 

Mr. Everett was in Congress, as a member of the 
House of Representatives, for ten years, from 1825 to 
1835. It has commonly been thought that he owed 
his passage to public life to the success of his ora- 
tions on patriotic subjects; but he was elected before 
they were delivered, and his nomination was deter- 
mined upon about the time of his Phi Beta Kappa 
discourse. Attention was drawn to him, as havino; 
talents for public life, principally by his appearance 
before the Board of Overseers of the University, in 
the spring of 1824. The Board of Overseers was 
at that time probably the most august assembly in 
New England. He appeared to represent the cause 
of the Faculty, or local government, in their claims 
to the fellowships of the corporation. He was op- 
posed by powerful interests in Boston and Salem, 

luit l)ore liimseH' with such firnmess, dignity, and 

;i.s 



A IJ I) IlES^. 

courtesy, and showed such presence of mind as well 
as power of speech m debate, as to draw to him 
the attention of leading public men and prepare the 
wav for his nomination to Congress, which was 
perhaps secured by the success of his Phi Beta 
Kappa address. 

In Congress, he sustained his reputation as an ora- 
tor, but did not establish a reputation as a debater. 
Whether he could have succeeded, in any assembly, 
in the conflicts of extemporaneous speech, I do not 
undertake to say; but the House of Representatives, 
impaired in its character by an influx of a kind of 
ruffianism which came in from the South and South- 
west, was not as favorable a field for his peculiar 
qualities, certainly, as the Board of Overseers. He 
left, however, the reputation of a learned, hard-work- 
ing, faithful publicist and legislator. Always upon 
the Committee on Foreign Relations, he was the au- 
thor of its celebrated report on the Panama Mission, 
the leading topic of the day; and distinguished him- 
self as an advocate of Greek independence. He 
took an active part in the Georgia controversy, al- 
ways and earnestly supporting the unpopular and 
losing cause of the Cherokee Indians, whom not 
even the decree of the Supreme Court, which the 
President did not attempt to execute, could protect 
against the rapacity of Georgia. He served upon 
the Committee on the Library and Public Buildings, 
of which, it may be well supposed, he was a most 
useful member. 

From Congress, he passed to the chair of the 



A l> I> R E SS. 

chief magistracy of Massachusetts. He held the of- 
fice of Governor for four years, during which were 
begun and completed some of the most important 
acts of our State policy, for which we are largely 
indebted to his enlightened and earnest support. 
Among these, I may name the establishment of the 
Board of Education, of the sj^stem of Normal Schools, 
the agricnltural and scientific Surveys of the State, 
the revision of our Statute Law, and the subscrip- 
tion of the State to the Western Railroad. 

At the close of his last term, in 1840, he sailed 
for Europe, for the benefit of the health of a member 
of his family. While in the 80uth of Italy, in 1841, 
he was appointed Minister at the Court of St. James, 
and repaired to London to find a larger accumulation 
of difficult and critical questions than has ever fallen 
upon one of our ministers, except it be the present. 
Every foot of the boundary line between us and the 
British provinces was in dispute, from the Bay of 
Fundy to the Lake of the Woods. The militia from 
Maine and New Brunswick were under arms, and the 
danger was increased and the questions complicated 
by the burning of the Caroline and the arrest and 
trial of McLeod. Lord Aberdeen, the Secretary for 
Foreign Affairs, had put forth a claim of a right to 
visit vessels of other nations suspected of being en- 
gaged in the slave-trade. Our fisheries in the Bay of 
Fundy were in dispute, the case of the Creole was 
pending, and there were delicate questions respect- 
ing Oregon and Texas. Such was the confidence of 
the administration in Mr. Everett, that he was left 

4U 



to meet these questions without specific instructions. 
The graceful and friendly act of Sir Robert Peel, 
then Prime Minister, in sending Lord Ashburton as 
Minister Extraordinary to Washington, removed the 
boundary question, and incidentally that of the right 
of visit, from Mr. Everett's cognizance ; but all the 
questions that he dealt witli he treated as a jurist, 
a scholar, and a thorough patriot. 

In 1845, Mr. Everett returned from England, and 
was elected President of our University; and, on the 
spot where I now have the privilege to stand, he 
delivered that inaugural address, wdiich should be the 
pride and study of American scholars. Those who 
heard it will not fail to recall wdth me his recitation 
of that passage from Cicero respecting Natura sine 
Doctrina and Doctrina sine Natura, in a style so ad- 
mirable, that there was nothing left for a hearer but 
to exclaim, — Could Cicero have done it better? 

On this occasion, there was an occurrence which 
put suddenly to the severest test the equanimity and 
ready resources of Mr. Everett. The day and j^lace 
were his and his only. The crowded assembly waited 
for his word. He rose, and advanced to the front of 
the platform, and was received with gratifying ap- 
plause. As he was about to begin, the applause re- 
ceived a sudden and marked acceleration, and rose 
hiocher and hiorher into a tumult of cheers. Mr. Ever- 
ett felt that something more than his welcome had 
caused this; and turning, he saw, just at that opening 
behind your seat, Mr. Mayor, the majestic presence of 
Daniel Webster! The reception of Mr. Webster had 

F 41 



ADDRESS. 

additionjil force given to it from the fict that he 
had just returned from his conflict in Congress with 
Ch.arles Jared Ingersoll, who had made an attack up- 
on his character, and that this, his first appearance 
among us since, was altogether unexpected. I had 
heard Mr. Everett's readiness of resource called in 
question. I looked — all must have looked — to see 
how he would meet this emharrassment. He turned 
again to the audience, cast his eyes slowly round 
the assembly, with a look of the utmost grati- 
fication, seemed to gather their applause in his 
arms, and, turning about, to lay it ministerially at 
the feet of Mr. Webster, saying to him, as I re- 
member, — I wish, sir, that I could at once assert the 
authority that has just been conferred upon me, and 
" auctoritate mihi commissa," declare to the audi- 
ence, " exspectatur oratio in lingua vernacula, a 
Webster." But I suppose, sir, your convenience and 
the arrangements made by others render it expedi- 
ent that I should sj)eak myself, — at least at first. 

You will agree with me that the exigency was as 
embarrassing as it was sudden. How could self-j)os- 
session escape from it more gracefully ! 

As President, his success was equivocal. We have 
been told that at the time of his appointment he was 
thought eminently fitted for the post by the entire 
community, with but one exception, and that an im- 
portant one, for it was himself Deep as was his in- 
terest in the University and in academic life and 
learning, he knew the duties of the office, and 
doubted his (itness for their dischar":e. His ideal of 



.1 b U R E S S . 

a student's purpose and achievement was high. He 
knew what he himself had felt and done, expected 
too much, and suffered too much from disappoint- 
ment. I think, too, that he judged rightly in com- 
paring his temperament with the duties which would 
fall to him. All, however, agree that his general 
plans for the University were far-seeing, liberal, and 
well laid, and many fruits have been reaped from 
them to this time. He was especially careful for the 
moral condition of the students, and was unwearied 
in his efforts to protect them against temptation, and 
to bring them under religious influence. He was 
the earnest advocate of encouraging the psycho- 
logical studies, which he feared were being over- 
borne by the natural and exact sciences: holding 
that moral truths were in their nature so superior, 
that the slightest of them were of more value than 
all facts or theories that begin and end in material 
objects and interests. 

In 1852, Mr. Webster, with failing health and bro- 
ken spirits, came home to Marsh field, turned his face 
to the wall, and died. A telegraphic despatch sum- 
moned Mr. Everett to Washington, to take charge of 
the Department of State. Mr. Webster's long illness 
had left an accumulation of business and some dis- 
order in the department. Mr. Everett applied him- 
self to his work with his habitual laboriousness and 
system, and established rules which have been found 
useful in the despatch of business. Within a few days 
after taking the portfolio, he prepared his answer to 
Lord John Russel, on the subject of a tripartite 

43 



ADDRESS. 

nlliance. Hjul he done nothing else, that letter 
would have established his reputation as a publicist, 
a scholar, and a thorough, uncompromising American. 
The election of Mr. Pierce to the presidency, who 
had not Mr. Everett's support, ended his term of 
office on the 4th of March, 1853; and on that day he 
stepped from the Department of State to the Senate, 
to which he had been elected by the Legislature of 
Massachusetts. Hardly had he taken his seat, when 
the discussion arose on the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in 
which he was oblio-ed to encounter Mr. Doua;las, ad- 
mitted by all to be one of the most formidable, and 
thought by many not the most scrupulous, of debat- 
ers. If one may judge by the reports in the Con- 
gressional Globe, Mr. Everett bore his part manfully 
and well. It was in this debate that, addressing Mr. 
Douglas, he made his celebrated plea for twenty-five 
more years of peace. He there gave the first signs 
of his apprehension that a spirit of military aggran- 
dizement and conquest might possess the country, to 
its ruin. From the enlargement of our country by 
the peaceful operation of natural causes, he enter- 
tained no fears; but he did fear lest our simple, electo- 
ral, representative system might not stand the stress 
of military aggrandizement and conquest. He drew a 
picture of what this country might be after twenty- 
five years of peace, — the development of all its ma- 
terial wealth, its multiform industries, the spread of 
education and the advancement of knowledge, with 
the necessary military and naval science duly culti- 
vated, — a people capal)le of bearing arms, a treasuiy 



44 



ADDRESS. 

without debt or heavy taxation, and the devoted and 
reasoning attachment of the people to their govern- 
ment, — and declared, that if then a just war must 
be made, such a people would l)e invincible. 

The next year, evil and in an evil hour, Mr, 
Douglas introduced his amendment to the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill. Mr. Everett joined earnestly and elo- 
quently in the resistance to that measure. He saw 
in it the political and territorial advance of slavery 
and the receding of freedom, and was filled witli 
gloomy apprehensions of a conflict to come. On the 
test vote, upon the adoption of the amendment, Mr. 
Everett voted against it, with Mr. Seward, Mr. Sum- 
ner, Mr. Chase, and six others. So desirous was he 
to stand on the record against it on every occasion, 
that when the final vote was taken on the passage 
of the general bill, which was but a formal vote, he 
remained in the Senate, though in feeble health, suf- 
fering in body, until nearly four o'clock in the morn- 
ing, and then retired foY a little rest, ujDon an under- 
standing, as he supposed, that the vote would not be 
taken that night. The next day he returned to find 
the bill passed, and asked leave to record his name 
against it, stating the circumstances of his absence. 
Mr. Clayton made a like request. It required unan- 
imous consent. Mr. Dodge, of Iowa, made the un- 
gracious objection, and the names were not entered. 
In May of that year, by advice of his phj^sician, and 
unwilling to perform imperfectly the duties of such 
a post, he resigned his seat. With this ended his 
official public life. 

45 



ADDRESS. 

Bat how can I close a notice of his pubhc hfe 
without alhiding to that test by which posterity will 
judge American statesmen of the last twenty years, 
— the question, with what wisdom, sagacity, self- 
command, and courage have they met the subject 
of slavery ? Being of the number of those who dis- 
approve, nay, who condemn, the course of concession 
and compromise to which Mr. Everett inclined, — 
and that, they knew full well who gave me public 
leave to speak of him, — I feel the more bound to 
render to Mr. Everett, on this point, the justice that 
I think his due. Believing always, and more firmly 
now than ever, that every concession made or of- 
fered to slavery, since the adoption of the Constitu- 
tion, has but encouraged its arrogance, beckoned it 
on in its advance toward imperial powers, and em- 
boldened it for the final conflict; believing that the 
only pacificator, if any were possible, was a thorough 
understanding, from the beginning, that no conces- 
sions could be expected ; I can yet understand, I 
think, the state of mind of Mr. Everett. We ought 
not only to look at the subject from his point of 
view, as the phrase is, but from his interior state. 

I have endeavored to impress you with the convic- 
tion Avhich I feel myself, of the immense importance 
Mr. Everett attached to the preservation of our na- 
tional system ; to show you that he returned deeply 
impressed with this from Europe; that it was the re- 
sult of all his studies and observations; that it was the 
theme of his first public discourse, and the inspiration 
with which he entered public life forty years ago. It 

•4G 



ADDRESS. 

was not pride of empire, nor merely patriotism, but 
a solemn conviction that it was the one great experi- 
ment, in the fulness of time, and under the most 
favorable circumstances possible, for the widest and 
highest moral and intellectual development of human 
nature. To him, it was also the peacemaker and 
civil izer of the continent. He had no faith that the 
institutions of the States could be preserved, if the 
general government failed. He knew that it might 
fail. He knew it was an institution of men, to be 
managed by men; and he knew too much of the 
passions and weaknesses of human nature to be of the 
number of those who think that a vast people can 
make and unmake society and fundamental institu- 
tions, at their pleasure, without loss or peril. He had 
always had before him a vivid, some may think a 
morbid, but certainly an honest, impression of the 
direful consequences of failure. As long ago as 1835, 
at Amherst, he said, " If this great experiment of ra- 
tional liberty shall here be permitted to fail, I know 
not when or where, among the sons of Adam, it will 
ever be resumed." In 1851, in New York, fourteen 
years ago this day, he declared "Secession is war, — 
must be war;" and of all wars, civil war, and of all 
places for civil war, in the republic of America! He 
said then, and it was always his belief, that if se- 
cession was attempted, the American people would 
have before them but this alternative,— disintegration 
or civil war. Secession, acquiesced m or yielded to, 
ended the power and authority of the general govern- 
ment; and that gone, he saw no security for the States 

47 



AJjDJi KSS. 



themselves. He had seen the Supreme Court settling 
the boundary line between Massachusetts and Rhode 
Island upon paper titles, as it would have determined 
the disputed boundaries of farms in a civil action ; 
but, the central authority abolished, passions excited, 
vast interests at stake, he did not believe that a peo- 
ple who had overthrown or permitted to perish a Con- 
stitution given them by the wisdom of Washington, 
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, would respect arbitrary, 
surveyor's lines run on parchment charters from 
dead Annes and Elizabeths. His temperament may 
have led him to see dangers more vividly than pos- 
sible resources; but to him they were real. As the 
Israelite, wandering in the desert, to the ark of the 
covenant, as the Jew to Jerusalem, as the Mussulman 
to Mecca, so did he look to our Constitution and 
Union. He had always thought the danger immi- 
nent, as well as great. In 1856, he said, privately, — 
he did not think it wise to publish the opinion, 
— that that was probably the last Presidential elec- 
tion which would be acquiesced in. He did not 
make the mistake of underrating the power or the 
purpose of Southern society. He believed that if 
they entered on the course of secession, and the 
collision occurred, it was war, — war in its most vast 
proportions, and with all its hazards. 

In making up a tribunal to pass judgment on the 
course of Mr. Everett, there are classes of persons who 
may well be subject to "challenge for cause." Those 
who did not value the Union as he did, can hardly 
judge him in the price he would pay for its ransom. 



48 



A l> U Ji E SS . 



Tho:^e who have the pleasing iancy that there is 
little cost or risk in resolving society into its orig- 
inal elements, to make it over again at our will, are 
hardly capable of placing themselves at his point of 
view. They, too, may well be counted out, and with 
them would go the large majority of the North, who 
did not believe the danger real, or, if real, great, — 
who underrated the slave-power, in its capabilities 
and its purposes. 

On the other hand, Mr. Everett is not to be con- 
founded with those who were indiiferent to the 
concessions proposed, — with that great number, far 
too great, who, first palliating slavery, then excus- 
ing it, passed at last to justification and sympathy. 
Whatever he may have said or thought, in youth, of 
our political relations with slavery, — when slavery 
was but a local institution, not justified but rather 
excused where it existed, and not suspected of look- 
ing to nnperial power, — his opinions as to slavery 
itself, in its moral aspects, were never equivocal. 
His position was that of compromise, but not of 
ambiguity. 

In 1853, at Washington, when he was Secretary 
of State, at -the period of the most extreme sen- 
sitiveness and extravagant demands of the slave- 
power, he delivered an address before the Colo- 
nization Society, in which he controverted their 
fundamental principle with all the powers which 
he possessed. He urged that the negro must and 
could civilize Africa. He met the argument that 
the negro was not capable of self-government, — of 



49 



ADDRESS. 

constructing and maintaining a civilized empire, — 
that he is essentially inferior and mnst be governed 
by the white, by saying, " I do not believe it." 
He not only contended that, as a human being, the 
negro was substantially equal, but he drew proofs 
from all history, and discredited the assertion of his 
incapacity by showing that races had been enslaved 
and as degraded as the negro, yet had risen to be 
among the master-races of the globe. He wrote the 
biography of Abdul Rahaman, an African prince, a 
scholar, and a prince in manners, who, having been 
made captive in some disastrous battle and sold into 
slavery, was met, years afterwards, in the streets 
of a town in Tennessee, in the garb and duties of 
a slave, — a coincidence that would have seemed 
unnatural in fiction, — by an American citizen, who 
had been a guest at his father's court when trav- 
elling in the interior of Africa. I scarcely know a 
clearer proof of what slavery is than the fact that 
neither by law nor by money, nor by persuasion, 
though multitudes joined in it, could this prince be 
rescued from bondage to a man who had paid for 
him on the auction-block. He was liberated it is 
true, at last, and returned to his native land, but 
after many years of effort, and not by any course 
for which the slave-system made jDrovision. 

I think Mr. Everett knew the nature of slavery, 
that he felt its injustice, and the deplorable con- 
sequences that must follow in its train. When he 
proposed to concede anything to it, he knew what 
he conceded. He knew why he conceded. He 



AlJljRESS. 

weighed out the concessions scrupulously and pain- 
fully. He took no satisfaction in any of the com- 
promises which had been or were to be made with 
it; still less did he ever treat them with levity, or 
profess to perform their duties with alacrity. He 
did not join the Democratic party, whatever the 
temptation, because he believed, — I speak of a fact 
of history, — I would not take advantage of my 
position to-day to wound the susceptibilities of any 
man, — because it was his belief that that party had 
become too much the ally of the slave-power. He 
preferred to be without a party. He looked over 
the whole field. He balanced vast moral consid- 
erations. For purposes which he understood, he 
was willing to make concessions which he appre- 
ciated. 

Among men capable of understanding such vast 
questions, and whose objects are no other than the 
public good, the dividing line is not one of logic, 
but of temperament. It is, as Macaulay said of 
Whig and Tory at one time in England, a good 
deal a question of Natural History. Without un- 
dertaking to analyze and classify those qualities of 
Mr. Everett, ' physical and moral, which go to make 
up what we call, for convenience, the tempera- 
ment, one cannot but be struck by the contrast 
between him and another statesman of Massachu- 
setts, his near neighbor in birth and residence, 
— John Quincy Adams, — of whom Mr. Choate 
once playfully said, in the privacy of his study, 
what has passed into public biograph}^, — "What an 

51 



.1 />J)RESS. 

I 

antagonist he was ! An instinct for the jugular and 
carotid artery equal to that of any of the carnivo- 
rous animals ; " and whom Mr. Everett described 
as one whose natural place would have been at 
the weather yard-arm in a tempest, or leading the 
forlorn hope through the deadly imminent breach. 

Mr. Everett is also fairly entitled to be judged 
as a peace man. I do not mean, in the formal 
and technical sense, but in spirit and in truth, a 
peace man. His weapons were the tongue and 
the pen. He knew that the tongue was a sharp 
sword, cutting deeper than the life of the body, 
and the pen an arrow, hurting past all surgery. 
He used these his weapons with the self-denial 
and the consideration of a true philanthropist. He 
believed that those who make war are as respon- 
sible as those who fight war, whether in private 
society or in the society of nations. He believed 
that the Christian benediction upon the peace- 
maker might fall upon many a man who, at the 
call of society and in a just cause, gasped out his 
life in the roar of battle, and yet be forfeited 
by those, who, drawing some formal distinction 
about the personal use of sword and musket, yet 
allow themselves to wield the weapons of the tongue 
and the pen in a spirit which, if not repressed in 
actual warfare, would carry it back to the days of 
barbarism. Cast your eyes over all he has written, 
recall whatever he has spoken, and tell me whether 
you find one word which affects his right to be 
judged, in spii-it and in truth, as a man of peace. 



ADDRESS. 

Mr. Everett knew that wars were caused as of- 
ten by estranged feeling as by actual wrongs ; and 
it seemed to him that there was one chord of 
common sympathy between North and South which 
might yet be touched with some hope of success, — 
the common love and respect for the memory of 
Washington. He prepared a discourse upon the 
character of Washington, to be delivered througliout 
the country, in aid of the fund for the purchase of 
Mount Vernon. As a rhetorical composition, adapted 
for declamation in public, by a master of elocution, 
it probably has not its superior in American liter- 
ature. He spoke it in all parts of the country, 
north, south, east, and west, to the largest and 
most brilliant audiences, in all, no less than one 
hundred and twenty-nine times ; obtaining, by the 
sale of tickets of admission, about $50,000 for the 
benefit of the fund. What a splendid realization 
of the brio-ht vision of his vouth, — of a common 
language and extended education, — when we con- 
sider that this discourse has been heard by more 
men and women than ever listened to any one 
discourse by any one man, so far as we know, 
since the beginning of time ! 

The times were beyond the reach of such sedatives 
as this. But he had done what he could. He felt 
that he was standing between earnest and strong 
parties, and that his course was no longer popular, and 
was subjecting him to the suspicion of timidity and 
inadequate instincts and opinions. In an oration on 
the 4th of July, at Boston, in 1858, he said. "T know 



ADDRESS. 

that this has ceased to be a popular strain ; but I 
willingly accept the unpopularity. I know that in 
certain quarters 'Union-saving' is treated with real 
or affected contempt. I am content to share in the 
ridicule attached to anxiety for the preservation of 
the Union." His tone at this period was always 
solemn, and not hopeful. In 1860, he accepted the 
nomination for Vice-President from a party organized 
upon a principle of compromise between the Repub- 
licans and the Democrats. He thought that the 
Democratic party had gone too far in allying itself 
with the slave-power, and that the Republicans were 
imreasonable in refusing all concessions. I do not 
think this nomination could have had much attrac- 
tion for him, or that he had much hope of its 
success. 

At length, the blow was struck ; and not by us ! 
The war was begun by the slave-power in rebel- 
lion. He took his position instantly. It was neither 
equivocal nor compromising. He threw the whole 
weight of his character, influence, and powers into 
the scale for the national life. He discarded all 
party connections ; put at hazard life-long friend- 
ships ; refused all criticisms on details of men and 
measures, military or civil ; and gave to the admin- 
istration a generous and thorough-going support. He 
urged the war — thorough, earnest war, with all the 
powers of war — for the preservation of the Union. 
As for slavery, while he would not strike a blow 
at that, under a pretence of military necessity, in 

violation of what is fundamental in our constitution, 
r)4 



ADDRESS. 



yet, when the administration decided, in good faith, 
that such a niihtary necessity did exist, he sustained 
both the authority and the pohcy of the government. 
It has been said, very commonly, that in all 
this Mr. Everett had undergone a great change, 
that he had, in fact, made a revolution in his 
opinions. I do not so regard it. His course, tlie 
last four years, seems to me to have been the log- 
ical result of the convictions and purposes we have 
found possessing him forty years before, and up to 
the moment the war began. That same immense im- 
portance which he attached to the preservation of our 
system, not for pride nor for patriotism only, but for 
the good of the human race ; that same belief in the 
reality and magnitude of the danger to the Union ; 
that conviction that secession must be Avar, by which 
he had prepared his mind for the result, and was 
not taken by surprise; that same conviction of the 
military and political power of slavery ; that same 
conviction that secession, acquiesced in or yielded 
to, was disintegration, was the end of our national 
system, and perilled the existence of the States 
themselves, and opened the flood-gates for all those 
consequences which he most feared and detested for 
human nature ; that same conviction that war, dread- 
ful as it is, may sometimes be just and necessary; 
all the convictions and purposes which inspired his 
tongue in youth and early manhood, — which per- 
suaded him to concessions while there was a hope 
of averting the catastrophe, — these same convictions, 
when the w\ar had begun, found him poised, collected, 



bb 



,t unnEss. 

inisLirprised, satisfied in understanding and in con- 
science that the duty to preserve the Union was a 
paramount duty, that compromise with Secession was 
impossible, that the war must be fought through, 
to its end. He had no new reasons to give. His 
attempts to avert and to assuage may have been 
useless. That is matter of opinion. It is matter of 
opinion, too, whether they were wise or brave ; but 
his course, when the catastrophe came, was con- 
sistent with his course from the beginning. The 
surgeon who sees that a capital operation may be 
necessary, but fears that it may be fatal to life, 
may put it off too long, and dally Avith palliatives 
worse than unavailing ; but it would be a mistake 
of terms to call him inconsistent for using the 
knife resolutely when he sees it unavoidable. 

I think, too, — many have thought, — that from 
the moment the point was reached beyond which 
slavery was no longer to be respected, Mr. Everett 
seemed to enter upon a new life. Whatever else 
the war had emancijjated, it had emancij^ated him. 
He was no longer bound by obligations of compact, 
or law, or policy, to the slave-power. His tone 
recovered something of the cheer and elation of 
his youth. He seemed to cry, in the words of 
ancient Church for thousands of years, "Laqueus 

CONTRITUS EST, ET NOS LIBERATI SUMUS." 

In this war, he did not wait for conscription or 
for bounty. He enlisted at once in the only arm of 
the service for which his years had left him fitted. 
He felt, as he so touchingly said in liis last pul)lic 



.1 l> l>l! !■: ss. 

words, at the lueetiiiiJ' ibr the Sa\'annah siillerers. in 
Faneuil Hall, " I aiii an ohl man. Thei-e is nothing 
of me left with which I can serve my country, except 
my lips." He felt that the understanding and con- 
science of the people must be satisfied on the subject 
of this war. He knew that false doctrines of State 
rigrhts had been so fostered as to lead some tt) doubt 
our riirht to subdue a rebellion becrun in the name 
of a State. He knew that party spirit, the blame 
of which lay on both sides, crippled the power of the 
government. He felt that long association with the 
slave-power and its leaders, in political party, had 
produced, in many, a latent sympathy which blinded 
them to the sin of the rebellion, and made them cold 
in their country's cause. He determined to devote 
whatever he had of eloquence, of logic, of learning, 
to the instruction and persuasion of the public mind 
and conscience; in his own words, in 1824, to 
" disdain mean conceptions, and speak a noble word 
which w^ill touch the heart of a great people." He 
prepared a speech upon the character of the war. 
Its object was to show the sin of the rebellion, its 
unprovoked and causeless character ; to show the ne- 
cessity and rightfulness of the war, and to enforce 
the duty of a generous, self-sacrificing, earnest sup- 
port of the government. This speech has never been 
printed. A few days since, I had the pleasure of 
holding the manuscript in my hand. It is written 
in his careful handwriting, and on the back he 
had noted the places and dates of its delivery. It 
was spoken first in Boston, on the .16th October, 

H 57 



A l>n/i ESS. 

18G1, and tlieii no less than sixty times in about 
thirty weeks. It is known that he was infirm in 
heahh, subject to sudden and painful attacks, pecu- 
liarly dej)ressing when away from home and friends, 
and aggravated by journeyings. He was bowed 
also by domestic bereavement. Yet, through the 
long winter, in weariness and painfulness, in journey- 
ings oft, and not without peril to life, he traversed 
the country upon his mission, speaking in nearly 
every large city not within the enemy's lines. — in 
Baltimore and Washington, in St. Louis, Detroit, 
Chicago, Milwaukie, Davenport, Dubuque, and at St. 
Paul, at the head-waters of the Mississippi. We can 
imagine his sensations when he, the orator of the 
Phi Beta in 1824, stood at the foot of the falls of 
St. Anthony, pleading the cause of his country, in 
the vernacular tongue, before a large and culti- 
vated resident audience, where, twenty years after 
his Phi Beta Kappa address, nothing was to be 
seen but limitless prairies of the buffalo, forests of 
wolves, and an intersection of the war-paths of the 
Sioux and the Chippewas. 

From the beginning of the war, Mr. Everett had 
carefully abstained from all party action. He said 
that if he could exert any influence, it must be in- 
dependently of political party. But in 1864, when 
candidates had been named and purposes declared, 
he came to the oj^inion that the election was not 
a question of political part}^ He was convinced 
that the continuance of the administration, by the 
reelection of Mr. Lincoln, was, to all human view, 

58 



A /JJUIESS. 

the only coarse for the preservation of the Union. 
He made one speech in Boston, again addressing 
himself, calmly and plainly, with an absence of all 
attempts at mere rhetorical effect, to the under- 
standing and conscience of the people. On this 
question, no citizen of the republic had a position 
for influence like his. Not only did his age, dis- 
tinction, experience, public services, and character 
command respect, but his previous course gave him 
a peculiar influence with that large class on the 
middle ground, not intrenched within the party 
lines, upon whose action the result so largely de- 
pended. This speech was widely circulated, and 
produced a great effect upon the class of persons 
to whom it was addressed. On the second Monday 
in November, he presided over the electoral college 
of Massachusetts, and certified its vote for Mr. Lin- 
coln. This was the last official act of his life. 

Whatever difference of opinion may remain as to 
the Presidential election, I am persuaded that no 
\oyal and patriotic man, looking at what Mr. Everett 
has done during the last four years, will refuse to 
join me in saying that, much as Mr. Everett owed 
to his countr}', he did not die in its debt. 

His public official life had ended. But he an- 
swered to every call of benevolence and patriot- 
ism. He was selected to utter the national voice 
at the consecration of the cemetery at Gettysburg. 
He made an address at the opening of the fair for 
the seamen of the nav}^, in Boston. He welcomed 
the officers and the crew of the Kearsarge, at 

69 



ADDRESS. 

Faneuil Hall. The loyal Teiniesseans, among their 
valleys and mountains, will pass down his name with 
gratitude to children's children. After a day of la- 
bor, pressed with care, and so infirm in health that 
his absence might not only have been excused but 
justified, he would not, could not refuse, — a blessed 
instinct led him to speak at Faneuil Hall for the 
sufferers at Savannah ; and so, the Cradle of Liberty 
received his last public utterance ; so, he fitly 
rounded his life, ending, as he began, a preacher 
of the gospel of charity. It is touching to think 
that this man, who had stood before kings and 
people, and held the great arguments of public law 
and reasons of state, in the high places of the 
earth, at length and at last comes back to the 
uttering of those simple, primitive precepts which 
his mother had taught him at her knee. 

It is time, more than time, that my voice should 
cease. Yet, may w^e not delay a moment, for the 
satisfaction of expressing our belief that the fame 
of Mr. Everett, as a speaker and writer, has been 
fairly earned and is firmly fixed? I do not see why 
it has not been as fairly earned as the painter, 
sculptor, poet, or composer earns his. The artist 
produces his statue or picture, the poet his lyric 
or epic, the composer his oratorio or symphony, sub- 
mits it to tlie judgment of time, and abides the re- 
sult. For fifty years, year by year, Mr. Everett has 
submitted orations, speeches, diplomatic letters, es- 
says, and lectures to the judgment of his age, 
and abided the result. Jf that judgment has been 



.1 JjJjIlJ'JUS. 



favorable to liini, it cannot be attributed to fraud, 
accident, or surprise. His written and spoken style 
has been submitted to various tests, — the test of 
novelty and the test of familiarity ; has been a])- 
plied to great varieties of topics, in various places, 
and before two generations ; and has survived the 
changes and chances of taste and opinion. That 
same written style, which at the first charmed 
this critical community, was found, after forty 
years, equal to a contest with the trained diplo- 
matists of Europe, on the theatre of the Nations. 
That elocution, which in the freshness of its 
youth filled Brattle Street, its aisles, ay to its 
window-tops, and moved to a kind of ecstasy the 
select audiences at Cambridge, Concord, and Plym- 
outh, was found, in its gray and bent age, ii([u-d\ 
— more equal than any other — to the exigen- 
cies of the most vast and momentous popular can- 
vass the world ever saw\ 

We will not pause to recall what is well known 
of his characteristics, — his memory, in quickness and 
tenacity tairly entitled to be called wonderful ; his 
systematic habits ; his love of the highest and best 
topics, men, and books; the singular purity of his 
life, the dignity of his manners, his decoi'ous com- 
pliance with all the reasonable and many of the 
unreasonable demands of society, his reverent partici- 
pation in Christian ordinances. Those who remem- 
ber, in his address on the character of Washington, 
the loathino- with which he describes Frederick the 
Great displaying at once his disbelief in the Christian 



tji 



ADDRESS. 

doctrine of the resurrection and his contempt for 
his species, by ordering his body to be buried with 
his dogs at Potsdam, can understand the sensibiUty 
with which he must have contemplated such a rev- 
erent Christian burial as has been accorded him by 
this community. At that, we take our leave of 
him. We cannot follow him further. But we may 
look into the vacancy, repeating his own words, — 
"After nature, after time, after life, after death, we 
reach those sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 
where the philosophy of the mind awaits, at the 
foot of the Cross, a wisdom hiuher than its own." 

62 



APPENDIX: 



CONTAININU 



THE PROCEEDINGS OE THE CITY COUNCIL OF CAMBEIDGE, 



on THE DECEASE OP 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



DEATH OF EDWARD EVEI{ETJ\ 



At a meeting of the City Council of Cambridge, January 18, 1865, the 
Mayor, Hon. J. Warren Merrill, made the following communication : — 

CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. 

Mayor's Office, January 18, 1865. 

Gentlemen op the City Council : Since we last met, 
every mind has been startled and every heart saddened by 
the announcement of the sudden decease of one who was 
formerly a resident of our city, and whom we, in common 
with all our countrymen, delighted to honor. 

The Hon. Edward Everett began his career as a public 
speaker within the walls of our honored University on the 
occasion of the visit of the noble Lafayette, and afterwards, 
as its President, added new lustre to its fair fame. During 
his residence with us he took a deep interest in our schools, 
and was ever the friend of popular education. 

But it is not from considerations of local interest that we 
are called upon to honor his memory. The many eminent 
positions in the State and in the nation which he occupied 
and adorned, and the noble example of public and private 
virtue which he gave us, alike move us to love and respect 
his memory and to give expression to these feelings. 

I 65 



APPENDIX. 

For many years he was engaged in political life, yet 
during all its strifes his opponents never questioned the 
purity of his motives ; and the nohle manner in which he 
came forward when traitors fired on the flag of the Re- 
public, in support of " the Constitution and the enforce- 
ment of the laws," filled up the measure of his fame, and 
secured for him the homage and gratitude of every loyal 
and patriotic American. 

I do not doubt that you will esteem it a privilege to take 
such action as will give expression to your feelings on 
this sad occasion, and I content myself with the sugges- 
tion, that, as his memory is, and will be in all the ages to 
come, associated with that of Washington, as his most 
eloquent eulogist, you provide for suitable public ser- 
vices before the citizens of Cambridge, on the 22d of Feb- 
ruary proximo, in honor of his memory. 
Respectfully submitted, 

J. WARREN MERRILL, Mayor. 



The ibregoing communication Iiaving been read by the Mayoi-, the fol- 
lowing order was adopted in the Board of Aldermen : — 

In Board of Aldermen, January 18, 18C5. 

Ordered, That the communication of His Honor be sent 
to the other Board, and that Messrs. Choate and Carter, 
with such as the Council may join, be a committee to con- 
sider and report what action shall be taken by the City 
Government to testify their respect for the memory of the 
late Mr. Plverett. 



The order was adopted by the Common Council, in concurrence, and 
Messrs. Fuller, Sawyer, and Blanchard were joined on said Committee, 
on the part of that Board. 
66 



APPENDIX. 

The Committee retired, and, after a short time, suhmiltiMl the follow- 
ing report and resolutions : — 

In Board of Aldkrmen, January 18, 1865. 

The Committee appointed to consider and report what 

action shall be taken by the City Government to testify 

their respect for the memory of the late Hon. Edward 

Everett, submit a partial report. They recommend that 

the accompanying resolutions be adopted by the two 

branches of the City Government, and ask for further time 

to consider what further action should be taken by the 

City in accordance with the suggestion of His Honor the 

Mayor. 

C. F. CHUATE, 

For the Committee. 

11 E S O L UTI O N 8 . 

Wkereas, Since the last meeting of the City Council, tiie 
Hon. Edward Everett, for many years an honored citizen 
of Cambridge, has departed this life, deeming it due to the 
City and to themselves to enter upon the records of the 
City their deep sense of gratitude for his example and his 
life, and their grief for the loss which they, in common 
with the Commonwealth and the nation, have sustained in 
his decease in the maturity of his great powers and the 
fulness of his usefulness: 

Resolved, That the City Council of the City of Cam- 
bridge, gratefully recognizing the services of tlie deceased 
in all the high stations he was called to fill, — his spot- 
less life, his varied learning, his matchless eloquence, his 
comprehensive patriotism, his philanthropic labors for suf- 
fering humanity, which have made his name and memory 
a precious heirloom of the nation,— share in the universal 
sorrow for a loss so irreparable. 



.1 PPENDl X. 

Resolved,, That the City Council count it a peculiar 
honor to the City of Cambridge that, for so large a portion 
of Mr. Everett's life, his home was within its borders, and 
remember and appreciate his ready services in the cause 
of public education in the City and his deep interest in its 
welfare. 

Resolved,, That His Honor the Mayor be requested to 
cause the flags on all the public buildings to be raised at 
half-mast, and the bells in the churches of the City to be 
tolled, on the day of the funeral of the deceased. 

Resolved,, That a copy of these resolutions and of the 
communication of His Honor the Mayor be sent to the 
family of the deceased, to manifest to them the heartfelt 
sympathy of the people of Cambridge in their bereavement. 



The foregoing resolutions were unanimously adopted by both branches 
of the City Council. 

A copy of the same was sent to the family of the deceased, and the 
following communication was received from Mr. William Everett : — 



Boston, January 23, 1865. 

The family of Mr. Everett have received the certified copy of the 
resolutions passed by the City Council of Cambridge, and desire 
me to express how much they have been touched and gratilied 
by the words of sympathy and affection from a city so long the 
home of their father, and so constantly the object of his interest 
and care. 

With great respect, 

William Everett. 



At tin-, regular meeting of the City Council, Feb. 1, 1865, Alderman 

« 

Choate submitted the following report : — 
68 



APPENDIX. 

Iisr Board of Aldkrmkx, February 1, 18G5. 

The Committee to whom was referred tlie communication 
of His Honor the Mayor, recommending public services on 
the 22d day of February by the City Government, in com- 
memoration of the life and services of the late Hon. Ed- 
ward Everett, have considered the subject and respectfully 
report : 

That in their opinion it is expedient and proper, in view 
of the relation subsisting for so many years between the 
City of Cambridge and the deceased, and the high estima- 
tion in which he was held by the people of Cambridge, 
that such public services should be held by the City Gov- 
ernment as suggested, and that Richard H. Dana, Jr., Esq., 
be requested to deliver an address on that occasion, and 
recommend the passage of the following order. 

For the Committee ^ 

C. F. CHOATE, Chairman. 

The order which accompanied the foregoing report was as follows : — 

In Board of Aldermen, February 1, 1865. 
Ordered, That His Honor the Mayor, and Messrs. 
Choate and Carter, with such as the Common Council 
may join, be a committee to make all necessary arrange- 
ments for the celebration of the 22d of February by the 
City Government, by public services and an address com- 
memorative of the late Edward Everett. 

The order was adopted by the Common Council, in concurrence, and 
the President of the Council, and Messrs. Merrill, Towne, and Blanchard 
were joined on the Committee, on the part of that Board. 

On the 22d of February a procession was formed at the City Ilall, 

and moved to the First Church, under the escort of the three Cambridge 

companies of unattached militia, where the address of INIr. Dana was 

delivered in presence of the City Council and a large number of inviti'd 

guests and citizens of Cambridge. 

69 



APPENDIX. 

At the regular meeting of the City Council, February 22, 1865, the 
following order was unanimously adopted : — 

In Board of Aldermen, February 22, 1865. 

Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be, and 
hereby are, tendered to Richard H. Dana, Jr., Esq., for his 
interesting and eloquent address upon the life and services 
of the late Edward Everett, delivered this day before the 
City Government, and that the Mayor be requested to ask 
of ]\Ir. Dana a copy of the address for publication. 

- 70 









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